Schools as youth-friendly climate shelters: co-designing socio-spatial infrastructures of care for urban heat adaptation

Urban heat is unevenly distributed, while adaptation often overlooks young people’s lived experiences. This study examines how embodied and emotional experiences, everyday spatial practices, and participatory co-design inform youth-friendly climate shelters as socio-spatial infrastructures of care. Participatory research with 42 students aged 12–14 from two public schools in contrasting socio-environmental contexts in Santos, Brazil, followed two cycles informed by the EMPOWER framework. Climate-perception activities, neighbourhood walks, body and participatory mapping, role-playing, future imagination, and identification of barriers and action pathways generated visual, textual, spatial, and observational data analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Findings reveal shelters envisioned as multifunctional spaces for thermal comfort, safety, autonomy, social interaction, and learning. Territorial inequalities shaped priorities and implementation possibilities, while co-design linked lived experience to governance awareness and initial action. The study advances care-centred, place-based and socially just approaches to urban heat adaptation.